How Advertisers Can Prepare for Facebook’s New Campaign Structure

On March 4th, Facebook will begin rolling out a new campaign structure that will make it easier for advertisers, regardless of size, to organize, optimize, and measure their ads. Up until this point, the social network’s campaign structure has consisted of only two levels — campaigns and ads. The new campaign structure will introduce a third level, ad sets.

Let’s take a closer look at the new campaign structure.

Campaigns

Not much is changing here; campaigns correspond to each of your advertising objectives, such as building brand awareness or driving web traffic. They’re designed to help you optimize and measure your results for each objective across multiple ad sets and ads.

Ad Sets

Each campaign can feature multiple ad sets, each of which has its own budget and schedule. Ad sets can also be organized to represent audience segments, like people who live near your business. This will help you control the amount you spend on each audience, decide when they will see your ads, and measure their response. Facebook’s ad delivery system will optimize delivery for the best-performing ad in an ad set.

Ads

Within each ad set, you can have multiple ads, each of which can feature different images, links, video, or text. You still have control the creative, targeting, and bidding at the ad level.

Using the New Campaign Structure

Depending on your business you might have different advertising objectives. For example, as the owner of a small hotel chain you might want to drive traffic to your website to increase reservations, increase brand awareness, and promote weekly offers. With the new campaign structure, you’ll start by creating a campaign for each objective.

After that, you’ll create ad sets representing the audiences you want to reach in each campaign. In a campaign built around driving traffic to your website, for instance, you might want to create one ad set for people who are on your email list and another for those who have expressed interest in attractions near your hotel.

The last step is to create ads for each ad set. Remember, you can create multiple ads within each one, making sure each ad is targeted to the same audience while delivering different images, links, video, or copy. Through this method you’ll learn which ads are resonating with each audience, ultimately helping you to create better optimized campaigns.

How You Can Prepare

According to Facebook, accounts will be migrated automatically to the new campaign structure between March 4th and March 30th. When it is, you’ll see a new tutorial in Ads Manager and in Power Editor. This migration won’t impact the delivery, spend, or performance of your existing ads, and you’ll still have access to historical data for any of your existing campaigns and ads.

Even if you don’t get access right away, you can still prepare for the new campaign structure by planning any ad campaigns that will go live after your account is migrated. To do so, decide on your advertising objectives and then create a campaign for each one. From there, define which audience segments you’d like to target and create an ad set for each of them.

Finally, create multiple ads within each ad set using different types of content. Remember, visual content goes a long way on Facebook. And you’ll want to make sure that all of the ads within a particular set are targeted to the same audience and have the same bid type. If you need help choosing an objective for your ad type, or just want to learn more about the new campaign structure, visit the FAQ in Facebook’s Help Center.

Jennifer Beese: Jennifer Beese has worked as a community manager and social media strategist. When she’s not writing, you can find her studying anatomy and physiology—she literally has a skeleton in her closet—or under the stars with her telescope.